← THE ARCADE  /  CHRIS BLEDSOE  /  THE SKETCH

The Chris Bledsoe Experience • Cabinet No. 5

The Sketch

Long before anybody had a phone in their pocket, the entire evidentiary record of this phenomenon was witness drawings — regular people, handed a pencil by a man with a clipboard, and asked to render the impossible. The board has restored the practice. You will be shown something for two seconds. Then you will draw it. Your drawing will be entered into the permanent record, and it will be judged.

FORM 12-B • PENCIL PROVIDED • DO NOT SIGN
Case total0 / 500
Time on the pencil30
Drawing 1 / 5

 

Awaiting the witness
Z = undo • C = clear • Enter = submit
Review board • docket

The board is seated. The pencil is on the table. The pencil is not sharpened, because the board has never once been asked to sharpen it.

 
The object
The witness
Overlap
■ agreed   ■ missed   ■ invented

You Are The Instrument.

There is no camera in this room. There has never been a camera in this room. For a hundred years the instrument of record in this field was a person, a pencil, and about four minutes of nerve, and the board is not going to pretend otherwise.

Five objects. Each one is shown for two seconds. Then the sheet goes blank and you have thirty seconds to put down what you saw. You may undo. You may clear. You may not look again — nobody ever gets to look again.

The board scores by occupancy grid. The method is printed on the docket, in the open, because we are not animals.

Doucheclosure Review Board • Exhibit Sheet Case 1947-∞

The Permanent Record

Five drawings. One witness. Filed in the order rendered, uncorrected, as required.

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WING DOCTRINE: We do not question the sighting. We question the intake procedure. A man sees something over a river and the entire apparatus of human knowledge hands him a pencil, a clipboard, and thirty seconds — and then spends fifty years reviewing his line quality. This cabinet puts you on the other side of the clipboard, where it turns out the object is genuinely very hard to draw and the pencil is genuinely not sharpened.